Vital work from across the ARCs in response to the pandemic is showcased in NIHR ARCs: Supporting the fight against Covid-19 (PDF), including work led by ARC South London designed to rapidly understand the response of mental health and palliative and end of life care services to the pandemic, to inform patient care.
The publication brings together case studies demonstrating how ARCs pivoted their research programmes in response to the pandemic. It showcases work across a range of themes including children and young people, care homes, equality and diversity, end of life care and workforce planning.
Three case studies from ARC South London are included in the report. The first features the work of the ARC’s applied informatics researchers who used the Clinical Record Interactive Search (CRIS) system at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust to analyse electronic mental health records to monitor the response of services to Covid-19.
The team, led by Robert Stewart, professor of psychiatric epidemiology & clinical informatics at King’s College London, produced a series of reports, which went on to inform care and national policy on how to prioritise vaccination.
This research illustrates the value of using applied informatics to learn from information contained in electronic health records. Using the CRIS platform, we were able to highlight inequalities in mortality among mental health service users and particular ethnic groups early in the Covid-19 pandemic. This enabled us to inform policy, including the decision to prioritise vaccination for people with serious mental illness and learning difficulties
The second case study highlights work by the ARC’s palliative and end of life care researchers who launched a collaborative national project to provide a rapid review of how palliative care services responded to the pandemic (CovPall). As well as documenting the challenges for palliative care and hospice services, the research advanced our understanding of symptoms and problems faced by Covid-19 patients, and the best treatments and therapies.
The third case study highlights the ARC's involvement in a London-wide network of applied health research centres and NHS clinical and transformation leads. The London Evaluation Cell, later the London Strategic Research Health and Care Learning System, was established in June 2020, to understand the London-wide service response to Covid-19 and to rapidly translate knowledge into service provision across the regional care sector.
The publication was led by NIHR ARC East Midlands, with communications support from NIHR ARC West. In the foreword, the ARC Directors write:
“In 2020, we made rapid changes to our research programmes across the ARCs, to inform policy and practice, improve health and care, and deliver national-level impact in this rapidly changing landscape.
Our expertise in data modelling, multiple long-term conditions, mental health and social care alongside our ability to build and sustain collaborations across the NHS, social care, the voluntary sector and industry, has placed us in a unique position. We have been able to contribute to the efforts to understand the virus and its impact on communities, locally, nationally and globally
The ARC Directors continued: “This publication outlines our response as ARCs, both collectively and individually, to this challenge. It showcases the part we have played in supporting the health and care sector and patients, public and communities. We are proud of our part in lending our expertise to understanding the disease and assisting the global effort to contain it, improving outcomes and saving lives.”
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Executive of the NIHR and the Department of Health and Social Care’s Chief Scientific Advisor, said: “The Covid-19 pandemic was unlike any health crisis we had experienced for a century. In order for us to tackle the pandemic swiftly and strongly, we needed a collaborative and sustained approach across health and care research that harnessed the power of our collective effort like never before.
This impressive report sets out how that effort was provided, extending across many different themes, specialisms, and areas of the country. It illustrates how researchers, working together to tackle a common cause, can have such an important impact for patients and the public
